How to write a research proposal for psychology?

This is a long complicated question.

You start with a research question. What do you want to study. Make it specific. I’ll give you an example. My proposal was on whether perceived parental support of orientation has a relationship with mental health outcomes and codependency in sexual minority female teenagers.

Then you look up the background information. What has been studied about parental support in teenagers, what has been studied about mental health outcomes in sexual minority teenagers, why is parental support important, what effect could low parental support have, etc etc etc.

Then you look at what sort of study you’re going to do (qualitative or quantitative), measurements you want to use. Who you’re going to be studying and how. Are they valid measurements? What statistics are you going to use to analyze your results.

There’s several basic sections.

Introduction = intro, background, literature review, hypothesis Methods = sampling (where are you collecting data from, how will you recruit), materials (what will you use, questionnaires, consent forms, etc), procedure (how will you give the participants the questinnaires or whatever, will you video tape, will you have oral interviews, behavioral checklists?) Expected results = what do you expect Discussion = what will the results mean, what are limitations to the study, what are legal, ethical, validity, reliability, cultural and diversity issues, future studies, and finally a conclusion